For almost 25 years, Republic Pictures in Studio City established major stars and film genres, influencing the evolution of the motion picture business. Innovative and risk-taking despite miniscule budgets, Republic’s filmmakers ensured the San Fernando Valley’s importance to the entertainment business for decades to come, both as a creative center and a welcoming home base.
Building the Business
Wily wheeler-dealer Herbert Yates combined business acumen with a love of movies when he organized Republic Pictures in 1935. Born in Brooklyn in 1880, former office boy Yates shrewdly got into the moving picture business in 1915 after purchasing part of a film laboratory. He later combined several labs to create state-of-the-art Consolidated Film Industries in 1924, while also acquiring music publishing firms and financing small independent film companies like Mascot Pictures. When several of the Poverty Row companies failed to pay their CFI processing bills, Yates merged them with Mascot in 1935 to create Republic Pictures. Based at the former Mack Sennett Studios in Studio City, it became one of the largest employers in the area.
Using quick, efficient assembly-line practices, Republic produced low-budget films aimed at audiences in rural and middle America, focusing on Westerns, serials and melodramas. It wildly exceeded Yates’ high-flying dreams thanks to the screen charisma of three iconic cowboy stars: John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. A young Wayne starred in Westward Ho, Republic’s first 1935 release; Autry, a Chicago-based singer on a Sears radio show, starred in its second release, Tumbling Tumbleweeds. However, Yates’ stingy, penny-pinching ways would eventually lead to pitched battles over the course of their long acquaintances.
Cadre of Cowboy Icons
Though considered a little soft, Autry’s friendly, good-guy persona attracted huge theatrical audiences to his song-filled, unpretentious horse operas, which Christian Science Monitor described as combining “a little song, a little riding, a little shooting, and a girl to be saved from a hazard.” His films and recordings soared to the top of the charts, and he demanded more money for his important contributions.
When Autry walked out on strike in 1938, Yates hired a green singer named Leonard Slye and his group Sons of the Pioneers to continue producing musical low-budget Westerns. Renamed Roy Rogers, the charming boy next door continued Republic’s winning western ways, gaining him the nickname “King of the Cowboys.” After Autry returned, the major crooner and the rising newcomer both remained top box office draws for years, thanks to their popular personal appearances at rodeos, concerts and radio shows, as well as their chart-topping songs. Their respective horses, Champion and Trigger, were stars in their own right, wowing audiences with their good looks, smarts and fancy tricks. Both men departed by the early 1950s to star in TV oaters, and to buy up rights to their starring films.
Wayne’s eight-picture deal with Mascot had brought him into the Republic fold in 1935. During his early tenure, the rugged tough guy appeared in action-packed Westerns and the high-energy, youth-oriented “Three Mesquiteers” (a play on Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers) series opposite an interchangeable list of co-stars while he starred in more expensive “A” pictures elsewhere. John Ford’s classic adventureStagecoach made Wayne a star in 1939, but he remained loyal to Republic for establishing him as a Western lead. In 1949, Wayne received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in Republic’s patriotic World War II film Sands of Iwo Jima.
Quintessential everyman Wayne even lured director Ford to tightfisted Republic to enhance the company’s prestige by producing a few “A” pictures. Wayne starred opposite the flaming red-haired Maureen O’Hara in 1950 in Rio Grande, Ford’s elegiac ode to stoic U.S. cavalry officers, and Republic’s best film, the 1952 spirited Technicolor Irish tale The Quiet Man, which earned Ford a Best Director Oscar. However, when Yates refused to let Wayne direct or produce his dream film, The Alamo, the star walked away.
Out of This World and Close to Home
The first studio to recognize the popularity of comics and superheroes, Yates’ Republic produced boffo box office serials based on the comic strip Dick Tracy, the radio series The Lone Ranger and DC Comics character Captain Marvel, among others. They served as Republic’s early bread and butter, luring young audiences to Saturday matinees with their impressive sci-fi effects, derring-do and suspenseful cliffhangers. Consisting of 13 to 15 episodes running 15 to 20 minutes apiece, these beloved shorts series blended out-of-this-world stories with exciting nonstop action in such titles as The Adventures of Captain Marvel, King of the Rocket Men and The Black Widow. Innovative brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker employed fantastic miniatures, mattes and background processing to create some of Hollywood’s most flashy and realistic visual effects for them.
Howard Lydecker also designed his own gadget-filled, camera-ready Streamline Moderne house on Buena Park Drive in the Studio City hills, which was named a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument in 2008. Stars themselves also lived near Republic for short work commutes — Wayne at 4735 Tyrone Ave. in Sherman Oaks and Autry at 10985 Bluffside Drive in North Hollywood and later 3171 Brookdale Road in Studio City — while Yates himself resided at 14050 Valley Vista Blvd. Autry and Rogers loved their communities so much they even served as local honorary mayors.
TV Takes Over
Television posed new perils for the studios in the early 1950s, as free broadcasts drastically reduced the popularity of B-movies and Saturday afternoon matinee serials. Instead of adapting its popular Westerns and serials for TV, Republic released a reduced schedule of more ambitious features, leased out empty soundstages and became the first studio to sell its movies to TV. Revenues expanded for a few years, until the well ran dry. Popular TV shows such as Leave It to Beaver and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were originally shot at the Republic lot before moving on to Universal Studios. Battles also ensued with the Screen Actors Guild over residual payments on films licensed to TV, hastening the studio’s decline.
Some considered Yates’ relationship with Republic star Vera Hruba Ralston a contributor to the studio’s financial difficulties. A champion Czechoslovakian ice skater, she escaped to the U.S. before World War II, appearing in the Ice Vanities and Ice Capades before signing with Republic in the 1940s and renaming herself after Ralston Purina cereal. She sometimes starred in the studio’s more prestigious releases in the 1940s, but often appeared wooden onscreen. The couple married in 1952 at Studio City’s Little Brown Church and remained together until his death in 1966.
Republic ceased production in 1958, instead leasing out its facilities and seeing rising profits from its CFI Laboratories. Victor Carter purchased Yates’ controlling stock, focusing on film processing and plastics. The new company leased and later sold the lot to CBS in 1967. National Telefilm Associates gradually acquired the film library, trademarks, logos and copyrights from a variety of companies, renaming itself Republic Pictures in the 1980s. Paramount Studios eventually acquired all rights to Republic (except Gene Autry and Roy Rogers features) by 2000, keeping the name a viable business concern.
Like the Mack Sennett Studios before it, Republic Pictures burnished the reputation of Studio City and the San Fernando Valley, drawing respect and accolades for its star-making ways and innovative, crowd-pleasing productions.
